WordPress site structure recommendations1210

Anyone here have a (strong) opinion on optimal WordPress site structure? I'm not talking about a theme, I'm talking about the best way to organize site navigation in WordPress to maximize crawl effectiveness.

At the moment, I'm planning on using my top keywords for the client as category slugs (that's a 'thing' in WordPress), for top level / parent categories.

And then use %postid%/%category%/%postname% as my custom url structure.*

Anyone have any more up-to-date approach you suggest?

Thanks in advance!
-DonO

* This structure results in a url like this example:
websitename.com/27/feathers/this-is-a-post-about-feathers

Where "27" is the unique article id, "feathers" is the category that the article appears in, and the rest is the title of the article.

What's good about this? According to the WordPress experts, giving the postid first eliminates the need for WordPress' search engine to step through mysql to find the article. So it's a big benefit to site speed and no cost to SEO. The rest is for Google to better understand what the site and article are about.

https? You have to ask yourself, "Why?" What is it that you need it for? Handling information that needs to be secured? It's not protecting your site. It's not protecting the information at either end of the connection. It simply encrypts it over the communication channel.

If you are handling, say, credit card information then you need more than just https (SSL). There are specific rules and storage requirements for that sort of thing. However, if you are actually letting an offsite payment processor handle the transaction then it is not occurring on your site anyway so you don't NEED the https.

Some suggest that customers expect to see it and therefore you should have it "just because". That's buying into misinformation and is, in my opinion, unfair to your customers. Better to inform rather than provide a false sense of security for something that isn't actually happening.

On plugins I'm using on WordPress, they recommend dumping the post numbers and going straight with the post name. When Googled, I've also found it is far more eye pleasing and enticing for the viewer. I'm using Yoast SEO and Smart Wordpress SEO. The second has more SEO keyword flexibility.

Smart WordPress SEO includes the section, "SEO Keywords". I have something similar on my agent site. It allows for more than just the meta description that Yoast has. I.E. I can add things like: reliable agent, experienced, cincinnati real estate, etc. to catch wider searches. It won't rank as high in those other searches and those words need to be in the content, but it can help. What pulled my attention to this was examining the Google analytics for my agent site where it shows a detailed list of search terms used any time my site showed in the results. "Cincinnati Real Estate" was a key search term and my ranking STUNK! I started using that phrase in content and in the keywords section and it has been steadily improving.

Using two SEO plugins could be counter productive. Yoast SEO also supports Keywords but, as Joost himself says, "I don't know why you'd want to use meta keywords, but if you want to, check this box." You will find it in the settings, Titles & Metas section, Other.

First rule of success: know your tools.

I suspect it is using the keyword in the content that is actually benefiting you. While I'm a little less harsh than @Steve, I tend to agree wholeheartedly with his earlier post. You are kidding yourself about some of your SEO positions, you've just been accidentally lucky in others, and you have a lot to learn.

@Rev Pretty much my thoughts, but prefer... 1) Keep learning your tools. If I'm not learning something new about them it is likely due to my not actively using them. 2) Keep learning your craft. He who makes no mistakes already made the biggest mistake of doing nothing.